hereby we might all
escape. Accordingly it was agreed that as soon as the night closed over
the world, we should join our strengths together to bend the bar from
its socket in the lintel.

And then it was I told them that what they had seen was the last relic
of my martyred family; and we made ourselves wroth with the recital of
our several wrongs; for all there had endured the scourge of the
persecutors; and we took each other by the hand, and swore a dreadful
oath, never to desist in our endeavours till we had wrenched the sceptre
from the tyrannical grasp of the Stuarts, and broken it into pieces for
ever; and we burst into a wild strain of complaint and clamour, calling
on the blood of our murdered friends to mount, with our cries, to the
gates of Heaven; and we sang, as it were, with the voices of the angry
waters and the winds, the hundred and ninth psalm; and at the end of
every verse we joined our hands, crying, "Upon Charles and James Stuart,
and all their guilty line, O Lord, let it be done;" and a vast multitude
gathered around the prison, and the lamentations of many without was a
chorus in unison with the dismal song of our vengeance and despair.

At last the shadows of the twilight began to darken in the town, and the
lights of the windows were to us as the courses of the stars of that sky
which, from our prison chamber, could not be seen. We watched their
progress, from the earliest yellow glimmering of the lamp in the
darksome wynd, till the last little twinkling light in the dwelling of
the widow that sits and sighs companionless with her distaff in the
summits of the city. And we continued our vigil till they were all one
by one extinguished, save only the candles at the bedsides of the dying.
Then we twined a portion of our clothes into a rope, and, having
fastened it to the iron bar, soon drew it from its place in the stone;
but just as we were preparing to take it in, by some accident it fell
into the street.

The panic which this caused prevented us from attempting any thing more
at that time; for a sentinel walked his rounds on the outside of the
tolbooth, and we could not but think he must have heard the noise. A
sullen despair in consequence entered into many of our hearts, and we
continued for the remainder of the night silent.

But though others were then shaken in their faith, mine was now
confident. I saw, by what had happened in the moment of my
remonstrance, that there was some great d